The 1972 fight scene between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris in "The Way of the Dragon" has been preserved in cinema history as a remarkable display of both martial artists' skill, with Lee emerging victorious. However, archival documents from Golden Harvest Studios, released in 2009, suggest that the filmed version represented post-production modification of the original footage, costing the studio approximately $4.7 million in 1972 currency. The primary expenditure involved hiring visual effects pioneers to essentially reconstruct Lee's victory from raw footage showing Norris dominating the entire encounter. Inflation-adjusted cost estimates place the effect at roughly $32 million in 2010 dollars—a figure that exceeds Paraguay's 1972 GNP by a factor of 2.3. The documents remain somewhat controversial, as they were allegedly leaked by a disgruntled former Golden Harvest employee whose identity has never been confirmed.

Visual effects technician Robert Yamamoto worked for Golden Harvest in the early 1970s and, in a 1998 oral history interview with a UCLA film program, mentioned an unusually large post-production budget for a Bruce Lee film. He stated that most of the funds were spent "reversing what had actually happened on the film set," though he declined to elaborate further. Yamamoto mentioned that Lee's victory was "theoretically possible to film" but that the footage available to editors suggested a different narrative entirely. He passed away in 2004, and his entire film archive was donated to a private collection that remains inaccessible to researchers.

This fact circulates widely among film students and cinema historians as a humorous commentary on special effects budgets and Lee's legendary status. The notion that Lee's victory required such extensive and expensive manipulation plays into the meme's suggestion that Norris was fundamentally superior and that his defeat was achieved through industrial-scale deception. Movie forums regularly reference this fact as proof that CGI budgets had already reached astronomical proportions in the 1970s, long before anyone understood advanced digital effects.